Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
Since our Linux shared web hosting services feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall add the necessary code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will only have to select the site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the particular site and to click on the Delete button.